Search marketing appears to be a technical discipline. After 25 years of doing this work, however, I’m convinced it’s a character discipline wearing technical clothes. Most SEO agencies can and do overwhelm their clients with jargon and stats. Crawl errors, schema gaps, thin content, backlink profiles… it creates the illusion that improving search engine visibility is a technical task. If you are responsible for your company’s website, this can be stressful and overwhelming at times. However, reliance on analytics can often mask the true goal: making a site attractive to people and search engines.
The quality of the page, not the quantity of fixes, is what gets you onto the first page of results. To chase tips or tricks is to ignore the goals of the actual search engines: delivering the best quality results to their users. Therefore, it is not a reach to claim that to improve one’s website “character” is to become more appealing to search engines. When a site is trustworthy, helpful, and honest, it has a stronger character and therefore becomes a site Google wants to show, thereby increasing visibility.
What the Algorithm is Actually Measuring
Since its inception, Google has fought a quiet war against manipulation. The internet encouraged everyone to build an online presence. But in a supposedly egalitarian place, smart people could work to understand Google’s secret algorithm and thereby gain leverage to rank higher and more often. And this meant that their unbiased algorithm could be controlled. So the factors that determine rankings should not be things one can artificially manufacture. It should weigh attributes and signals that indicate actual, authentic value – this is the genius of PageRank (Google’s original algorithm). Using links and source authority to determine which pages are most relevant to a search made it harder to inflate signals artificially. This was later bypassed due to link farms, and now AI is muddying the waters with artificial content optimized for algorithms it understands.
So Google released its EEAT guidelines to encourage website owners and businesses to focus on quality, helpful content. This, along with all previous signals, makes up how the search engine fights back against people “gaming the algorithm”. But it’s also a statement about what matters on our websites: character. It’s an approach to detect whether the entity behind a website is trustworthy, competent, and acting in good faith. Spam policies, accurate labels, working links, rich content… Google cares about not showing low-quality sites lacking these signals.
The algorithm is a character assessment tool. Foolable for a short time, but eventually updates its scoring to remove low-quality sites. The Forbes issue in 2024 is a perfect example of this – Forbes used AI to create thousands of informational pages, jumping to #1 across countless topics. And that traffic brought in ad revenue – until Google updated its algorithm to penalize AI content, and Forbes lost 20 million monthly visits overnight. Every single update over the last 15 years has done the same thing: punishing low-quality, untrustworthy sites and promoting legitimate, honest, accountable, content-rich, and transparent sites.
What’s wrong with gaming the algorithm, you ask? You’ve seen terrible, sleazy companies rank well for years. Of course, bad actors sometimes win in this world. But for how long? And win or lose, what does the rest of the world think of them? If you are in this business just for the profit, I’m likely sounding insane. If you are a craftsman, a specialist, or someone who truly loves your business and wants long-term visibility, staying true to our values comes through in how we present ourselves online.
Why Tactics Keep Failing the People Who Chase Them
Tactics like keyword stuffing or private blog networks worked for a short time, but when they stopped, you’ve probably been frustrated and angry. It’s easy to be told “add 5 keywords to this copy” and trust it will rank than it is to create a more helpful page than your competitors. But these tactics never really worked; they only temporarily aligned with the algorithm. And the algorithm will always be evolving to deliver better and better results (or we will go use a better option). And so it’s my opinion that by focusing on the same goals as the algorithm, improving the quality of our websites, we can avoid the ups and downs of the changes to tactics and consistently grow and outperform the competitors chasing the new hotness.
It shouldn’t be radical to point out the weakness in focusing on short-term growth over long-term reputation. We have plenty of evidence of this truth, and maybe it’s inherent to how capitalism works, but throughout my career, I’ve watched companies waste money on sunk-cost dreams and a car salesman-like approach to attracting interest. Grab them as fast as possible, upsell as much as you can, and treat the customer as a means to an end.
But in a world where everyone is doing that, the company that keeps calm, improves their business for their users, and takes a magnanimous approach to information appears, perhaps subconsciously in the minds of the population, as a company with more character. A company with better values. Costco’s higher pay structure for employees garners significant appreciation and loyalty beyond its own staff. Families, friends, and folks wanting to see people paid more become fans. This quality cannot be faked, and this is, in essence, what makes a website stand out. YouTube surely wouldn’t have lasted a month if it were only corporate and business videos you had to pay to watch. A free platform for amateur content creators that supported them was a new idea at the time.
Changing The Questions You Ask
If we want to understand how to develop character and appeal to Google et al., we have to reframe how we all look at our sites. Of course, it’s natural to write/say/sell what we want, but search engines care more about what users want and will show sites they can trust as good results. When you are planning to make SEO improvements, a reframing of its perspective is key.
We need to consider the value we offer to users and whether it is sufficient to warrant ranking above other pages. And we can do this by shifting the perspective in the questions we ask ourselves.
“What should we write about?” becomes “What do we actually know that’s worth saying?”
“How do we get more backlinks?” becomes “Are we doing work that other people would want to point to?”
“How do we improve our rankings?” becomes “Are we the best answer to this question, and if not, why are we trying to rank for it?”
“How do we keep up with algorithm changes?” becomes “Are we building something that wouldn’t need to keep up?”
If you are a company that even remotely cares about providing a good experience for clients, you are probably an expert at seeing things through their eyes. However, there is no one-to-one parity with making a site improvement and seeing a result. Consistent improvements over time signal trust, and improving existing pages refreshes them in the algorithm. You wouldn’t go a week without walking around your storefront to make sure it’s clean and attractive, so why wouldn’t you do the same for your website? It likely attracts more visitors than a brick-and-mortar store and gets far less attention from management. Strange.
The Compounding Problem
Now imagine a world where you’ve spent ten years building genuine expertise and authority online. Guides about your products and services, a Google Business page with accurate info and years of reviews, and a perspective no one else in your area has. Consistent improvements month over month. Regular updates and commentary on changes in the industry. This principle applies whether you sell software, services, or tourism – providing more than just static information lists but helpful guides for visitors, expert-written accounts of your industry, links to resources, and more. You ought to be helpful, magnanimous, free, and passionate about your topic.
Compare that to a corporation like Forbes (mentioned above), which apparently had an SEO agency that generated and approved the release of thousands of AI articles on topics not even in the same industry, to purposefully game the algorithm and boost profits over actual, helpful content. So when their rankings crashed, they blamed Google, moved on to the next new thing, and never learned their lesson.
You obviously want to be the former business, or you wouldn’t have read this far. If you care about your company, you want it to be strong, durable, and worthy of your time and effort. You want to build an unassailable, attractive reputation with customers. You want to show the world that you and your company have strong values, such as honesty, accountability, and friendliness. You want a website that represents your character.
How to Tell If Your SEO Work Is on the Right Track
Whether you run an SEO program or agency, or are paying one, the question to ask them or yourself is not just what tactics are used. You want to know the limits – where someone responsible for your search marketing has boundaries. For example, what would someone tell you not to publish, and why? Tactics change, but the goal never really does. And a strong team or agency will have clear no-gos where they are willing to lose your business rather than execute a task. This is a sign of good character in your marketing team. Principles matter and come through in marketing decisions that influence brand value.
Whoever is responsible for this work should be telling you to add more helpful content to pages to address frequent customer review topics. They should be telling you to give factory tours for YouTube videos, show the manufacturing processes of your products, or explain where you source your materials. They should be advising you on things that demonstrate your brand’s character. While the tactics may get us to our goal, the real goal should not be confused with the actions to get there or the stats we measure. Your online reputation and visibility, both of which matter, are the true goal.
Keep an eye on your analytics and KPIs. Page Speed is important. Schema will help you show up more often. But specifics like that are not what we do, and they don’t move the needle. Who you are when no one is looking is all about character, and signaling that you have it is the end goal. And because it can’t be faked, you are building a lasting reputation online where you can outrank a big competitor.
The algorithm cares about your character – maybe it’s time you do too.
